First there's the first shot, which takes its time and whose hard, graphic frame tells us what it's all about. It's not the scenery that will move; that's intangible. No, it's the characters in the story who will struggle within the frame.
Nicole and her ramshackle pink umbrella climb slowly up the right-hand side of the image, then cross it, then stop, she won't go to the other side, she'll turn around instead, back where she came from. The pink ribs of the umbrella that were supposed to protect her are no longer of any use, turned upside down. Nicole abandoned the umbrella, but not her walk. She's like an insect lost on a window pane; she's not complaining about it, are we complaining about fate?
Her home is so small, so dense, so singular, a jungle of refuge, reconstituted in plastic, rhinestones and cardboard, dreams of elsewhere, cravings for celebrations like those glasses of champagne on Christmas Eve next to burgers bought on the road. And then there's her son, Serge, barely out of his teens, with a button in the corner of his mouth, dreaming of the NBA and perhaps becoming a researcher, all encumbered by the sometimes overly intimate presence of his mother.
And this unlikely couple will live on in front of us to a certain extent.
When you put it like that, you might wonder: is this a suburban film? A political film? Social film?
In fact, for me, the big slap in the face was that it was all of that and none of that at all, because the tears I shed almost all the way through had flavours and origins as diverse as those of a BK on the day after a bender, the clarity of a dawn you know you'll remember for the rest of your life, the 'mossy shiver' on your skin when you first meet someone, nostalgia and anger, blind injustice, the tenderness of a sprig of mint, the wind wherever it blows. It's as if some of Almodovar's universe had crossed paths with Amos Kollek's in my memory; with the intense pleasure of seeing and finding so beautiful the flaws of those who are on the screen (a big favourite with this fair casting) and with whom we are happy to have lived a moment.
